Jennifer Massoni Pardini

Letter Home

We went home to California recently, after nearly a year since our last visit. Having lived abroad for so long, I assumed just being stateside meant we’d have more opportunities to see our ocean, our families, our friends. We’re 3,000 miles closer, after all. What’s a 6-hour flight when we were used to logging 14-hour ones? Our first year with H. there were a few reasons why it was just easier to stay close. And now, well, have you done a 6-hour flight with a toddler recently? At the end of the day, we still can’t just get in a car and go home.

It all makes me think more about here, the home we rent but inhabit day in and day out. I’m already attached though we don’t know how long we’ll remain. Last week, when our 90-degree days finally broke into morning cloud cover, I was excited to return to the loop I’ve mapped for me and Ruby and H. When my neighbor Carol drove by and pulled over for a quick chat, it felt like I knew the land. But the clouds felt good in the first place because they reminded me of my walks in San Francisco. They almost felt like fog. Home leads the way home.

I’m not sure what I know of San Francisco anymore. It’s changed, as everyone back home keeps saying. The tech money has moved in, which means anyone with a regular salary has had to move out, or will eventually and in the meantime speaks with authority about how much the city has changed. I only spent a few hours there this trip, for a pit stop on the drive down from Ryan’s mom’s house to mine. We had a playdate in the Presidio, then sat in the dunes on Ocean Beach with friends who live so close to where we used to. My toes didn’t even make it in the water, but we did walk by the old apartment. It turns out that during all that time, there was a heart right across the street.

I wanted to stay longer. I wanted to see all the friends I miss. But these trips are so full as is. There is never enough time. Time is here, in our other home, where the weekends can wash in and wash back out, where the routine is comforting, where Ruby is always with us, where nothing requires packing right now. It’s not the same, and there is so much we miss about California and the people we love there. But California can also feel like the ocean. Right there, still known, but not around us. Hearing it, most of the time, is a memory.

18 Months of H.

I don’t often swoon here. I do a great deal of processing, both to continue my own healing and to hopefully help others who have joined what San Francisco writer and new loss mom Katie Coyle beautifully deemed our “Dark Sisterhood.” Weaving in the grief journey is my second nature. And it’s endless. But so—I pray with all the will I have—is the joy of H. And I need to swoon for a moment and share some of the off-the-charts adorableness she has been up to lately. This post is for H. at 18 months.

• “Hugs!” is her new command. Ever since she figured out how to give them, her hugs have been incredible. Her arms wrap around my neck. Her sweet, giddy voice hums in my ear. Her tight squeeze embraces me whole. She means it when she hugs. And I melt every time. She hugs her animals and her friends, too. She is also a smartie and has started employing this sweetness as a way out of situations she’s grown tired of, i.e., the shopping cart. When she reaches her arms up and shouts, “Hugs!”, it works every time.

• “Mama” was a first word, but now she is really using it. Where she used to whimper for what she wanted, now she calls me by the name she has given me. When she wakes up in the morning, “mama-mama-mama” is the first word she speaks and the first I hear. I bound out of bed toward that summoning.

• We are raising a dog lover. Well, Ruby is. H. has known her since the day she came home from the hospital. Ruby is a willing lounge chair, playmate, and recipient of those incredible H. hugs. It’s beautiful to see H. extend that love to our friends’ dogs, too. To see nothing of fear. Unfortunately, we will have to teach her some of that, to be cautious around what we don’t know. Right now, her true nature is untarnished by hesitation. To witness such purity is remarkable.

• She is already a heart collector. Since June, she’s been saying it, first “har” and now the fully finished word. She points them out in her books or on her clothes. Hearts, needless to say, abound in our house. I marvel at all those we will find together as she grows. At some point, she will understand what hearts mean to our family and why we look for them. On some level, I’m sure she already does.

• She reads all the books. This may be our favorite ritual these toddler days. We’ve done it since she was itty-bitty. Now, she walks over to the shelf and picks out exactly what she wants to read. She says “again” or “all done” after each. This week’s go-tos are The Gruffalo, anything with Spot or Hello Kitty, and Madeline. When she finds something she particularly adores—a bunny or a bird—she leans her cheek against the page and hugs the book, too.

• She reminds me so much of Ryan. They look like twins, for starters. And they already play music together. I hope she also gets his patience, his calming outlook on the world, and his tendency to see clearly and quickly what is a big deal and what just isn’t.

H. is 18 months. She is our biggest deal, full of love and joy and wonder. Over all of it, I swoon.

Overnight

While mowing the lawn a few weeks ago, Ryan noticed a nest of three brown spotted eggs in the tree in our backyard. We swiftly commenced our bird-watching self-education. The mother’s tell-tale orange beak indicated a family of Northern Cardinals had chosen our tree. It’s a beautiful one, full of dense bundles of branches ideal for nesting, at least according to the Northern Cardinal. According to The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s website, All About Birds:

“A week or two before the female starts building, she starts to visit possible nest sites with the male following along. The pair call back and forth and hold nesting material in their bills as they assess each site. Nests tend to be wedged into a fork of small branches in a sapling, shrub, or vine tangle, 1-15 feet high and hidden in dense foliage.”

It’s the same branch that supports H.’s swing, so when she has pointed and said “swing” lately, I’ve explained that there are babies waiting to be born and that we need to help their mama protect their home. (Fortunately, her water table is just as enticing a draw these hot summer days.)

This year’s tree. <3<3<3

Last year in the other house, a mama bird nested under our deck. We noticed soon after we moved in and it felt like such a good omen—that we had chosen the same home this creature of nature had. And I felt the same this season in this house. In anticipation, I’d borrowed a bird feeder to put out from my care-taking neighbor, Carol. But the other morning, I saw a tangle of twigs beneath their home and it took several seconds for it to register—I was looking at their home, down in the grass instead of where it belonged up on high. The eggs were nowhere to be found.

“Only a few female North American songbirds sing, but the female Northern Cardinal does, and often while sitting on the nest. This may give the male information about when to bring food to the nest.”

It broke my heart to see that nest down on the ground, least of all because I’d been thinking of it as a good omen. My heart broke because I think of that mother, that father, losing their babies overnight. I think of so many parents I know now who have experienced the same thing.

Last year’s nest. These three made it. <3<3<3

My friend Charlotte, who I knew in high school but have come to truly know since her son Rhys was stillborn last year, told me something beautiful and astounding recently. That when I saw Lorenzo’s heart I saw that it was “ready to fly.” That there is “something very free about letting a heart go and fly…” I have been thinking a lot about flight as a result. For these birds, I’d like to think that they hatched and learned to fly all in one night. That upon their take-off, their eager wings knocked their safe haven, no longer needed, to the ground. Maybe. Maybe I can pretend not to know what I do of nature.

“The nest typically takes 3 to 9 days to build; the finished product is 2-3 inches tall, 4 inches across, with an inner diameter of about 3 inches. Cardinals usually don’t use their nests more than once.”

A female cardinal landed outside the window above my desk the other day. I recognize her now by that orange flash of beak against her mocha body. I also know now that the Northern Cardinal doesn’t migrate. So maybe it was the mother, staying close to the nest, in which case I recognize her in a different way. Maybe she will build another one nearby. Maybe.

When I told Carol what happened, she understood. That we can’t help but bring our stories to these sightings. That they stay with us for days. Charlotte gave birth to a daughter recently, almost exactly a year after losing her son. She named her Lark. It means songbird. Thankfully, that stays with me, too. <3

Brave Empathy

For about a week after my colleague Leslie Forman and I redesigned this site and redirected its message, I sat still, anxious to officially announce it. Why the hesitation? Oh, because grief advocacy is vulnerable work. The front-facing reframe—that my strongest voice is derived from my greatest loss—asks me to remain open and hopefully reach a growing audience. But that is the entire point now—to help others on similar journeys—so the day I felt as ready as I ever would, I told you all about it.

#chainlinkheartproject

Within 24 hours, I heard from Valerie Meek, who directs Pregnancy After Loss Support and who lost her son, Patrick, during her pregnancy last year. Just like that, she validated the vulnerability.

Since they launched last June, I’ve leaned on and recommended the PALS community. Lindsey Henke founded it after losing her first daughter, Nora, following a full-term and routine pregnancy, and to fill a void she felt as she carried her second daughter, born healthy last year. In Henke’s words, PALS’ mission is:

“To provide peer to peer support services and professional resources for the mom who is pregnant again after loss, supporting her in choosing hope over fear while also nurturing her grief. We want her to know she is a courageous mama no matter what her birth outcome, stage of pregnancy after loss, or way of birthing. We are here to support her on her journey when no one else is.”

PALS is volunteer-run in order to help moms like Valerie and Lindsey, moms like me, moms, perhaps, like you. When they invited me to be a monthly contributor, I couldn’t have said “YES!” any faster or more full-heartedly. I am honored to share my first post for PALS, where I examine the terminology we use (or don’t use) when we talk about loss and trying again.

I hope you’ll explore the site as a whole or pass it along to someone in need of this kind of solidarity. The magazine covers everything from trying to conceive to physical and emotional health for moms as well as a section dedicated to fathers’ perspectives. Additional resources include support groups, a moving love letter series, and training programs for health care professionals (coming this fall). As I’ve written about before, pregnancy after loss cannot be the same as pregnancy before it. I’m grateful a resource exists to reflect that hope and that fear, that healing that will always have roots in loss.

And remember my site designer, Leslie? Well, she is also re-presenting her platform to ensure that her work aligns with helping others. Her latest case study? This very website! As Leslie put it to me that day we got started, “How might a writer wrap a soft (virtual) blanket around the people who most need her story?” I’m humbled that we figured out a way to do just that.

Brave empathy, as I’m calling it, works.

What It Means to Know My Neighbors

When we lived in the house twenty minutes down the road, I never told our neighbors about Lorenzo. We moved a few months ago and here in our new neighborhood, I’ve already told three people. It’s not that it’s suddenly easier. Three years and several essays and an entire memoir later, I can still get tongue-tied when I’m starting from the beginning with somebody. But begin I have. Two are other young moms and one is a grandmother named Carol. I met her before we even moved in, when I brought Ruby by to get acquainted with all the new smells. Carol was walking her Border Collie, Hallie, and I felt such relief. Ruby would have a new friend like she had back on the cul-de-sac.

Weeks passed, and I finally ran into Carol and Hallie again. These June and July days have been hot ones, and she invited us into her back garden for some ice water. How embraced I felt walking into such enchantment. As the dogs ran around, H. pointed out little statues and ornaments shaped like owls and squirrels and bears and butterflies, all tucked under flowering shrubs or hanging from the branches of fruit trees or nestled by bird feeders. I took notice of a metal sculpture of a cross. Carol brought out the chalk and bubbles she keeps on hand for her grandsons, and H.’s day was made. All of ours were. We rested in the shade as bubbles popped and the dogs panted. I drew a heart on the stone patio with a blue piece of chalk.

I’m not sure exactly how it came up, but I know it felt natural to say, “We lost a baby before we had H.”

It also seemed natural for Carol to tell me about a kind of loss of her own, decades ago, a testament to the fact that these separations last our entire lives. I sent her my blogs and told her I’d already taken a photograph of her house and the accidental heart I noticed on the shutters before I knew the house was hers. She told me it’s actually another squirrel, painted there after her husband died seven years ago.

Whenever we all walk by now and Carol is gardening and we step back into her garden, I feel a little restored. I’m in the company of someone nearby who already knows rather than someone I’m waiting to tell. Recently, looking again at the cross, I felt compelled to finish the story: that we chose for Lorenzo not to endure his pain. I wasn’t sure how much she had read.

“I know,” she said, in that tone that soothes, her eyes on mine. Then, a few beats later, “That was God’s choice too, you know.”

I am not a woman of faith in the same way Carol is, but I appreciated hearing that from someone who believes as she does. Especially here in a town where bumper sticker after bumper sticker reminds me—as we idle, just trying to get to where we need to be—that my choice is incompatible with what they believe.

Last week at the hospital where Carol volunteers, a pregnant mom learned her baby no longer had a heartbeat. She was four-and-a-half months along and would have to deliver. It was going to take thirty minutes for her husband to arrive. Carol told me she had thought of me and Lorenzo and so she sat with this grieving mother and held her hand until her husband could.

“I just let her cry and cry,” she said.

That “just” is everything: to sit with the mom who is losing, to not shy away. I’ll never forgot the nurse who held one hand while Ryan held the other. Later, after the husband arrived and the baby was delivered, Carol brought them a small pot of roses, saying they might start a memory garden for their baby. She’d remembered the plant we’d recently found for Lorenzo.

That is what happens when we tell our stories. We help each other and that unfolds into helping someone else. I looked out over the incredible garden Carol has grown and saw clearly how much she is helping me.